It seems more relevant today than ever.

(on YouTube)

The European Union is seeking again to ban the swastika symbol. There has been a flurry of debate about the vastly different meanings the symbol has to different cultures.

This has centred on the feelings of the German nation, European Jews and Hindus.

From YNet News (via Anarchaia):

Germany plans to use its presidency of the EU to launch an initiative which could lead to common laws across the bloc making it a crime to deny genocide and display Nazi symbols.

“The swastika has been around for 5,000 years as a symbol of peace. This is exactly the opposite of how it was used by Hitler,” said Ramesh Kallidai of the Hindu Forum of Britain.

“It is almost like saying that the Klu Klux Klan used burning crosses to terrorize black men, so therefore let us ban the cross. How does that sound to you?”

Links

• BBC article
• Reclaim the Swastika reader comments
• Rainmountain posts to Flickr
• Positive Swastikas Flickr Group

Prout (PROgressive Utilisation Theory) is a visionary socio-economic system to encourage a cooperative society. A new short story competition has been announced for writers to open a window on a future, Proutistic society. From the press release:

IMAGINE A SOCIETY IN WHICH…
…food, clothing, housing, education and medical care are guaranteed to everyone.

…most farms, banks, industries and services are run as cooperatives owned by the workers.

…there are no multinational corporations.

…different voices, languages and cultures are respected.

…there is self-sufficiency in food, medicines, clothing, housing, and local transport.

…the environment is protected and restored, all agriculture is organic, waste is recycled and renewable energy is used.

…universal spirituality is valued, not religious dogmas or conflicts.

…leaders are selfless servants of the people.

STRUGGLE AND CONFLICT…
Naturally, such a society could never come about without great struggle. The richest one percent who control our world today would do anything to prevent it.

They direct the multinational corporations and manipulate the US Empire, going to any length to neutralise such a progressive society. When it does come about, there will always be selfish people who would try to destroy it for their own personal benefit.

CAN YOU DESCRIBE IN A COMPELLING WAY…
…the people, the struggles, the sacrifices, the tragedies and the triumphs that would be needed to achieve such a society?

…in which part of the world such a society would first take root and what threats, opposition, and deceit that would be employed to undermine it?

…how living in such a society would affect people?

SHORT STORY COMPETITION DESCRIBING A FUTURE SOCIETY BASED ON PROUT!
Prout stands for the Progressive Utilization Theory, an alternative socio-economic model. In the words of Noam Chomsky,
"Prout’s cooperative model, sharing the resources of the planet for the welfare of everyone, deserves our serious consideration."

To know more about Prout’s socio-economic model and its policies, see www.prout.org and www.proutworld.org.

The Prout Research Institute of Venezuela is hosting a short story competition about a future Prout society and the struggles needed to bring it about. Stories may not exceed 5,000 words and must be previously unpublished. Entrants may be located anywhere on the planet, but each person may submit only one story written in English, Spanish or Portuguese. The stories will be judged on whether the future society portrayed correctly represents Prout, as well as on good writing and originality.

JUDGES
A committee of four panelists, led by the published writer Devashish Acosta (author of "When the Time Comes" and "The Ashram"), will judge the contest. To ensure impartiality, all stories will be numbered and the authors’ names will be removed until the final decisions are made.

A Proutist who wishes to remain anonymous has generously donated funds so that we can offer the following cash prizes:

• First prize: US$500
• Second prize: US$300
• Third prize: US$200
• Five fourth prizes: US$100 each
• (Winners in economically developed countries will receive a check or bank transfer. Winners in economically undeveloped countries will be sent an international postal money order.)

The winning stories will posted on the Prout Institute of Venezuela website. In addition, the Prout Research Institute of Venezuela reserves the right to publish the stories in an anthology and in a Prout magazine.

DEADLINE
Midnight March 31, 2007 Venezuelan time (GMT minus 4 hours)
Winners will be announced May 15, 2007

All stories must be sent by email to shortstory[at]prout.org. There is no entrance fee. Stories that exceed 5,000 words, that arrive late or that do not describe the struggles to achieve or maintain a Prout society will be disqualified from the cash prizes. After June 15, 2007, all authors are free to submit their stories to other competitions or venues for publication.

Source: PRI Venezuela, via After Capitalism

There are plenty of wrongs to right in the world. We can but deal with one at a time…

I don’t know about you, but email spam really annoys me. There’s something repulsive about deceitfully and repeatedly forcing useless products onto millions of people who really couldn’t care less about viagra logo enhancements or anything else on offer. So…

Take Action
If you’ve ever made your email address public on a website, the chances are that it’s been detected by a spam robot and added to its database.

For the benefit of such bots, I’ve written a little script to churn out scores of random addresses, with a link to a page that has more of the same. The result is the SpamPit. May they never come out again…

To Add a SpamPit to your Website…
Either download the code (simply unzip it and upload the three files into the main directory of your site) or go through each part of the code below. You are welcome to modify it and redistribute.

This PHP function will return random addresses within <a> tags:

<?php
function getEmails(){
  // Settings
  $num_letters = 10;
  $num_emails = 70;
  $tld = array('com', 'org', 'net');
  // Generate addresses
  $emails = '';
  for($i=0; $i<=$num_emails; $i++)
    {
      $email = '@';
      for($j=0; $j<=$num_letters; $j++)
        {
          $email = chr(rand(ord('a'), ord('z'))) . $email;
          $email .= chr(rand(ord('a'), ord('z')));
        }
      $email .= '.' . $tld[rand(0, count($tld)-1)];
      $emails.= "<a href='mailto:$email'>$email, ";
    }
  return substr($emails, 0, -2);
}
?>

Simply call the function within the body of your page:

<?php echo getEmails(); ?>

If you want to have an infinite number of urls that call the same page, as in my version, you’ll need to do the following (assuming your site is hosted on an Apache server):

• Save your page as spampit.php
• Create a .htaccess file in your main directory, if you don’t have one already.
• Add this to turn on the rewriting of urls:

  Options +FollowSymLinks
  RewriteEngine On

• Add this rule to capture requests to any url that starts /spampit/:

  RewriteRule ^spampit(/?.*?(\d*)/)?$ /spampit.php?depth=$2 [L]

• Add this PHP function to spampit.php, which returns the url of the next page:

  function getNextUrl(){
    if (!isset($_GET['depth']))
      { $depth = 1; }
    elseif ($_GET['depth'] != '')
      { $depth = intval($_GET['depth']) +1; }
    else
      { $depth = 1; }
    $pattern = '/\/spampit\/?.*?\d*\/?$/';
    $replace = "/spampit/$depth/";
    $str = $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    return preg_replace($pattern, $replace, $str, 1);
  }

• You can now add an HTML link within the page to link it to the next page. You can get the href of the link by calling the function you just added:

  <?php echo getNextUrl(); ?>

  For example:

  <a href="<?php echo getNextUrl(); ?>">More addresses</a>

• Finally, you may want to create a robots.txt file so that genuine search engine bots don’t choke on your infinite address book… Add these lines to the file:

  User-agent: *
  Disallow: /spampit/
  Allow: /spampit/$
  Disallow: /spampit/*/

  The first line addresses all (well-behaved) robots.

  The second line is a standard robots.txt rule that to prevent bots indexing any part of the /spampit/ directory.

  The third and fourth lines are extensions to the robots.txt format, followed by some robots, which will enable them to crawl only the first spampit page.

  We are assuming here that a spambot will not care about a site’s robots.txt file and will just go ahead and crawl through everything… Well, let them!

Auroville is an experimental city, under development in south India. It is intended to be a model township – an international and universal place for personal, spiritual growth and social advancement.

Auroville exists for nothing less than to hasten the evolution of the human species – to develop the mind from its animal instincts to sublime intuition, and to manifest the inspiration of the Divine in the material world.

Origins

The idea for the town was inspired by the teachings of Sri Aurobindo – an Indian philosopher, freedom fighter and futurist who lived from 1872 to 1950. His greatest disciple, a Frenchwoman known simply as ‘The Mother’, came to India to be by his side and to realise his ideas. She proposed the creation of Auroville, which was finally founded in 1968. Representatives came from all over India and the world, bringing with them a handful of soil from their native lands, to be mixed in an urn at the centre of the city.

The current population is currently around 1800 ‘Aurovilians’. The aim is to have a thriving city of 50,000. The largest country represented so far is India, followed by French and German citizens.

The Matrimandir Temple

The building in the photograph is the Matrimandir – the ‘Temple of the Mother‘. Here, ‘Mother’ refers to the supreme Creative Force, the energy that binds Consciousness into the myriad forms of the universe. Compare with goddess Durga from Hindu mythology:

The Matrimandir is to be a place of concentration, for finding the source of one’s consciousness in the stillness of meditation. The red brick ‘lotus petals‘ each contain a room for meditation. Inside the golden dome is the ‘Inner Chamber‘ – a large, white, circular hall containing a huge glass crystal – the largest in the world – which focusses a beam of white light into the centre of the building.

The gold discs are actually made of gold — gold leaf, sandwiched in between two layers of glass and tiled like a mosaic around huge discs. This sphere of gold, around a place of great concentration upon human consciousness, is intended to have an electromagnetic influence on the state of consciousness for the rest of the planet…

In the following photographs, I use quotes from Sri Aurobindo and The Mother to illustrate the vision for Auroville.

Links:
• Auroville: In Quotes Photoset
• Auroville website
• Wikipedia: Sri Aurobindo
• Wikipedia: The Mother
• Wikipedia: Auroville

I was recently interviewed on BBC Radio 4 about the origins and meaning of the swastika symbol. The experience has focussed my mind on the significance of the symbol and the controversy that surrounds it.

It is a very ancient symbol representing permanent spiritual victory and has been held in great esteem by many different cultures around the world. The fact that such a benevolent symbol was abducted and utterly abused in the 20th Century makes it one of the most controversial symbols around. I have been finding that most people have an opinion about it – one way or another.

A movement has been started to Reclaim The Swastika for the spiritually inspiring intention that it truly stands for:
www.reclaimtheswastika.com

For your photos of swastikas in their natural habitat, I’ve started a photo group on Flickr:
www.flickr.com/groups/swastika/

“I was on the train and there was a sudden jolt forward … There was a really hard banging from the carriage next door to us after the explosion – that’s where it happened. There was a fire beside me. I saw flames outside on the window of my carriage … I saw bodies. I think some people may have died.”
- Sarah Reid, the tube at Liverpool Street

Many stories have emerged from London of people coming out of themselves to help each other, amidst the panic of the bombs. I’ve felt a real sense of camaraderie, where normally we would expect just anonymous faces in the crowd.

It is this collective spirit that gives me hope. In times of adversity, we see how people can empathise and care for each other. Let us hold onto this spirit in the coming days, as the nine-to-five slog struggles to re-establish itself as the norm.

The determination of Londoners to join together and get on with their lives has been widely noted and praised. A perfect demonstration of the British “stiff upper-lip” that kept us level-headed during the turmoil of the Blitz and a long history of invasion.

But amidst our resolve to resume life as normal, let us not lose the opportunity to understand why this has happened. Let us not blindly absolve our responsibilities to the powers-that-be. They have played their part in creating this. Their greedy and divisive aims must be exposed and challenged – and at the same time, the selfish lie of the terorrists’ dogma must be laid bare and crushed.

We have fanatics on both sides. May we hold dear to our heart-felt, human values and fight the vested interests on all sides until the true spirit of humanity is established.

“However dense the cimmerian darkness may be, the crimson dawn must follow. The fiends of hell may burst out in loud laughter, but all must fade in the void with the sunrise…

Those who love humanity and those who desire the welfare of living beings should be vigorously active from this very moment, after shaking off all lethargy and sloth, so that the most auspicious hour arrives at the earliest.”
- Shrii Shrii Anandamurti, New Year’s Day, 1971

The meeting of the G8 world leaders in Gleneagles, Scotland is about to begin. And Third World Debt, together with the poverty and exploitation it creates, is firmly under the spotlight.

Below are the latest photos from the G8 and Live8 groups on Flickr… They automatically update as new images are posted. Click a thumbnail to view the original.

• AfterCapitalism.org – cooperative economics blog
• IndyMedia UK – independent journalism at the scene
• MakePovertyHistory.org
• Live8 official website
• G8 official website
• G8 on the BBC
• Live8 on the BBC

The studios previously won a webby award for their movie “The Meatrix”, about the meat industry.

They are a talented bunch, using their time and skills for promoting ethical causes through multimedia. In their words:

We know we could be using our talents to sell cheeseburgers or sneakers, but we feel that an inherent part of creativity is the creation of something positive and meaningful.

I see they are also making a $15,000 grant to assist an ethical organisation communicate their message through the Web. Hmmm…

Here are some more of their activist movies.

Fairtrade Fortnight has been and gone, as has the all-night vigil outside 10 Downing Street for trade justice, which happened last Friday the 15th of April. Fairtrade is an important step in moving towards a just society – which, in today’s world of corrupt, exploitative capitalist businesses seems a long way off.

One of the current problems with Fairtrade is the lack of products on offer – if you look on the Fairtrade website you’ll find these listed – mainly luxuries like chocolate, coffee, etc

However, if you really want to take fairtrade to the next level, I’ve discovered a great site which sells (amongst other apparel)… fairtrade sneakers! And again… fairtrade sneakers!

Yes, you can kick Phil Knight’s corporate ass with these 100% union made Converse-style beauties, which come with an info sheet on the wages and benefits of the workers in Indonesia who made them. Just today they’ve emailed me telling that they’ve added two new styles to their range… and all for the comparatively cheap price of £25.
Check them out here: www.nosweatapparel.com

Change the world! Start at ground level!